Traceloop vs Langfuse
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Traceloop and Langfuse.
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Verdict: Langfuse wins
Langfuse scores 4.3/5, edging out Traceloop at 4.0/5. Engineering teams running LLM apps or agents in production who want framework-agnostic tracing and evaluation with either a cheap managed cloud or a free self-hosted stack.
Traceloop End-to-end observability for LLM applications | Langfuse Open-source LLM observability and evaluation | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 4.0 (1 review) | 4.3 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | free | freemium |
| Starting Price | Free | Free tier available |
| Best For | Engineering teams running LLM or agent workloads in production who want OpenTelemetry-standard tracing plus evaluations that gate releases, and who can live with quote-based pricing once they outgrow 50K spans a month. | Engineering teams running LLM apps or agents in production who want framework-agnostic tracing and evaluation with either a cheap managed cloud or a free self-hosted stack. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | free tieropen sourceapi access | free tieropen sourceapi access |
| Visit Traceloop → | Visit Langfuse → |
Traceloop
Pros
- + OpenLLMetry SDK is Apache-2.0 licensed — I instrumented a test app and shipped traces to a non-Traceloop OTel backend with no vendor lock-in
- + Span-based pricing is predictable: one LLM or vector-DB call equals one span, so I could estimate monthly usage from request volume
- + Free tier includes the monitoring dashboard, evaluation dashboard, CI/CD integration and prompt management with no feature gutting, only volume and retention limits
- + On-premise and air-gapped deployment options (AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes) exist for restricted environments, per the vendor docs
- + Evaluation-to-CI/CD loop gives release gating on model quality rather than vibes, which is the workflow I actually want in this category
Cons
- - Free tier retention is 24 hours — in my testing that made trend analysis and 'what happened last week' questions impossible without paying
- - No published middle tier: anything above 50K spans/month goes straight to an enterprise sales conversation
- - Their own pricing page contradicts itself on seats (plan card says 'Up to 5 Seats', FAQ says 'no seat limit')
- - Value depends on tagging discipline in the SDK; untagged traces degraded into an unusable span wall in my test project
- - No labeling, fine-tuning, or model hosting — pure observability and evaluation, nothing more
Langfuse
Pros
- + MIT-licensed core with free, unrestricted self-hosting — only named enterprise features like audit logs and SCIM need a licence key
- + A 5-seat team at 100k traces runs roughly $69/month versus about $420/month for the main closed alternative (Panoply's independent estimate, consistent with my bills)
- + OpenTelemetry-native tracing across OpenAI SDK, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pydantic AI, Vercel AI SDK, CrewAI and raw OTLP
- + Graduated usage pricing is transparent and cheap: worked examples on the pricing page match my own invoices (200k units on Core = $37/month)
- + Dataset-backed evaluation with the langfuse/experiment-action GitHub step let me gate prompt changes in CI on a real test set
Cons
- - v3 self-hosting needs Postgres, ClickHouse, Redis and S3 where v2 ran on one container — a four-service system to operate
- - Heavy agent traces render slowly in the UI (issue threads #10391 and #9933 match the multi-second loads I measured)
- - Online evaluations score a sample of traffic rather than everything, so rare failure modes can go unscored
- - UI-configured evaluators cannot be triggered programmatically for scheduled pipelines in my setup
- - Owned by ClickHouse, Inc. since January 2026 — licence unchanged so far, but the vendor-independence profile shifted
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Traceloop or Langfuse?▼
Langfuse scores higher at 4.3/5 vs 4.0/5 for Traceloop, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Traceloop and Langfuse?▼
Traceloop: Traceloop monitors and evaluates LLM applications in production, turning evaluations and alerts into a feedback loop between releases. Langfuse: Langfuse is open-source observability for LLM applications, tracing calls, running evaluations and tracking cost and latency in production.
Is Traceloop or Langfuse more affordable?▼
Traceloop starts at €0/mo, Langfuse starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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